Stranger in the House – Julie Summers #20booksofsummer

This non-fiction book takes a look at the women, be they wives, mothers, sisters or daughters who welcomed back their menfolk from the Second World War. How did these women adapt to the men who returned from battlefields or prisons? How did they begin to cope with all too apparent trauma that returned with them?

Stranger in the House is a collection of reminiscences about life in the immediate aftermath of the war and of the long term consequences of readjustment. There are interviews with wives, widows, sisters, daughters and granddaughters showing how this war cast a very long shadow indeed. Julie Summers has also raided the historical archives to give us the mother’s view – these poor women had often already lost members of their family in the First World War, how brave they must have been to send off their sons to another conflict.

This is a book full of details, clearly carefully researched and full of real accounts from the women who had lived, not only through the upheaval of war itself, with sometimes many months with no idea whether their loved ones are alive or not, to the aftermath with damaged men returning to families, sometimes children who didn’t recognise their fathers and all this with severe rationing in place.

“When their war ended, our war began.”

Of course the men themselves had an enormous adjustment to make and it seems like those in charge had accounted for the fact that support was needed for these fractured families following the huge failings of the First World War but this concentrated on practicalities like housing rather than what was really needed which was emotional support for the men and women who had to pick up the pieces of their lives.

The structure of the book is that the chapters relate to all the different subjects from the aftermath of war, communication and the variety of different relationships the women had with the men that returned from war.
One of the early chapters focusses on the contrast between those men stationed where the Army Post Office were able to deliver and those who weren’t. The men and women who had received regular communication on the whole fared much better than those who hadn’t.

“Letters for us stand for love, longing, light-heartedness and lyricism. Letters evoke passion, tenderness, amusement, sadness, rejoicing, surprise. And none of this is possible without the Army Post Office”

Of course some of those letters told of children born while the men were away, and not all of these could be explained in the husband’s absence. These families had a whole different struggle when the men returned and the author didn’t shy away from this difficult subject.

There is a particular emphasis within the book on those men who had been Japanese prisoners of war and it seems from the accounts in this book that many of these men were specifically ordered not to talk about their experience and of course these men often came back with serious medical problems to cope with too. The number of different voices, children at the time of their father’s return, who talk about rituals or issues over food and mealtimes is striking and so sad to read. The often factual accounts which are devoid of exaggeration or a wish for sympathy are all the more heart-rending because of that.

It is particularly touching that the last chapter speaks to the grandchildren of these men and often these children, not bought up to avoid any talk of the war, got the men to open up for the first time to their relatives and the families heard what the men had seen and heard during the six long years of war.

I don’t think I’ve read a book about war that more poignantly illustrates that for a whole generation the war was never really over.

This makes me realise, yet again, just how lucky I was to have been my father’s daughter. Dad was in various Japanese POW camps between February 1942 and August 1945. When he came home he made a conscious decision that he was not going to let the war have anymore of his life than it had already had. Although this meant that he didn’t talk much about his experiences, he also didn’t let them effect his day to day existence. The war was past. Not that he came out of it unscathed. I know that before I was born he had had psychological help and he was also told that he wouldn’t be able to have children. My mother had several miscarriages, almost certainly because the foetus wasn’t viable. I was born in 1949. I am the child that should never have lived.

The other remarkable thing about my father was that he refused to hold any animosity against his captors. They were, he always said, doing the same thing he was, standing up for their understanding of what was right and wrong and obeying orders. As a result, I grew up in a much healthier atmosphere then many of my peers, but because of their experiences I do know how lucky I was.

Thank you for taking the time to comment. One of the things I liked about this book was that it also included stories such as your father’s – those men who did manage to put their experiences behind them to a certain extent. Until I read this book I didn’t realise that so many men were told that they wouldn’t be able to have children- extra heartbreak for them and their loved ones!
As you say though there were many men for whom the horror never abated and my heart ached for them, and their families.

What an interestingly different perspective this book offers because clearly for those who come back from war – any war – even if physically intact, can’t help but be changed by the experience. By what they’d seen, by what they’d had to do perhaps. And their families have to cope with that without ever really being able to understand what they’ve been through. Sounds fascinating.

I love history anyway but I’m especially keen on the way women’s lives have changed over the years and then there was this book that was full of information about an area that is rarely even considered. It was moving and informative.

This sounds like such a powerful book, Cleo. There’s nothing like the voices of people who have actually been through things to teach us what they’re really like. And it sounds as though the book deals with all of this at the very human, gut level.